Riga Circus

The theme of this year’s edition of the Latvian capital’s annual contemporary art festival, Survival Kit, was the broadly interpretable notion of “outlands.” This was meant to encompass any number of ideas, from the peripheral status of cities such as Riga and other Eastern European capitals in the international art world (along with, perhaps, the inference that it is on these peripheries, outside the watchful eye of the market and the gaze of trend spotters, where the truly exciting and innovative developments are taking place) to the even more remote position of those “other places” that are too war-torn and troubled to even carry the dubious quasi-colonial vestige of the “exotic.” It’s from those places that refugees arrive to crowd Europe’s shores. The festival intended to evoke the myriad ways that otherness is constituted and, on a macro level, the recrudescence of various